


A Study in Conviction

by faedemon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Domestic Violence, Family Dynamics, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Multi, Murder, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Prison, Pureblood Culture (Harry Potter), Squibs, The Smiths - Freeform, Torture, Unforgivable Curses (Harry Potter), Worldbuilding, attempted self-harm, each focusing on one unforgivable, okay i know yall wont know any of those characters so hear me out, there is no graphic depictions of rape child abuse or self harm, these tags refer to three distinct sections, these topics are meant to be abhorrent and are depicted as such, this fic is meant to show a world larger than the one harry sees, where 'unforgivable' curses aren't as simple as you think they are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:54:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23810383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: There is more than one way tomean it, when it comes to the Unforgivables. Some people are cruel enough to use them just to hurt or kill, but Dark Lords aren't the only ones who have access to these spells, and genocide isn't the only reason they're used.A study of how Imperio, Crucio, and Avada Kedavra might be used in the hands of someone who isn't a Dark Lord or a Death Eater or a mass murderer. A study of an Unforgivable in the hands of a person.
Relationships: Mandy Brocklehurst & Megan Jones
Comments: 10
Kudos: 31
Collections: my best fics





	A Study in Conviction

The Unforgivables are treated, at least within the walls of Hogwarts, with the same hushed-voice anxiety that physical muggle murder is in high schools. If your friend mentions _Imperio_ , it’s whispered, and if the Slytherin passing hears him, she keeps her head down and walks by. Students will murmur among themselves and wonder what it’s like, how someone could cast such a spell, whether _Avada Kedavra_ is as painless as they say. It’s the kind of subject that seems a distant, incurable evil to a child. The Unforgivables are a concept no young witch or wizard can truly wrap their minds around without witnessing it, for they are spells first and foremost of conviction.

Everyone knows that to cast an Unforgivable, you must mean it. The majority of children who walk Hogwarts’ halls won’t understand exactly what it is to “mean it” for years to come—never, if they’re lucky. The kids who whisper with an excited sort of horror think of this conviction as a cruel thing, and often it is. The Unforgivables are illegal for a reason, and _Crucio’s_ express purpose is to cause pain. Children think this conviction to be shaped like Lord Voldemort: careless, without remorse, so small a consideration that it’s like breathing. To a child, the spell to kill is nothing else.

For the witches and wizards who see the Unforgivables up close, it’s not as simple.

There is more than one way to _mean it_.

**imperio.**

There is a bigger-than-average house on a muggle road in muggle suburbs and in it lives three generations of a three-fourths squib family. Mandy Brocklehurst, her older brother, her younger sister, their parents, their aunt and uncle, and their grandparents live there, and in the medium bedroom on the second floor, Mandy reaches for a penknife while her best friend Megan Jones desperately holds her back.

Mandy was the first witch in the family since her grandfather Albert Caswain, much to the surprise of all when she got her Hogwarts letter. She had never shown any sign of accidental magic, and the fact that her father was muggle got so many scoffs from her grandfather that they were quite convinced the bloodline had been muddled so thoroughly no one would ever be magic again. But she got a letter, and her mother took her to Diagon Alley, marched her into Ollivander’s, and demanded the man tell her if her daughter was a squib or not.

She was not a squib. Her hazel and dragon heartstring wand lit up in her hand there in that shop like she’d cast the brightest _Lumos_ , and just-shy-of-eleven Mandy Brocklehurst felt it touch that swirling part of herself she’d never known how to name. She was a witch. She was magic.

The day Mandy came home with bright eyes, wand in hand, was the same day the air in her house grew sour. It had always been, just slightly—Albert Caswain hadn’t forgiven his daughter for marrying a muggle any more than he ever forgave his wife for bearing a line of squibs, and Mandy had lived in that miasma since birth. It intensified that day, when her brother Tungsten and her sister Ella caught sight of her bright eyes, her broad smile, her pristine new wand.

Her grandfather doted on her, at least in the sense that he gave her his gruff approval, whereas everyone else received the same scornful glare. He let her sit with him while he put together models of Quidditch pitches, let her ask questions about Hogwarts. He was the only person he stowed his wand for, funnily enough—Albert had been flaunting his magic in front of the rest of them for decades, summoning salt from the other end of the table and slamming doors from across the room. It was Mandy that he asked to bring him his coffee instead of his usual _Accio_. Mandy, always Mandy.

She loved the attention, and for it, the rest of her family withered.

Tungsten hated her. He was fourteen when she turned eleven, and had always thought her a brat, but magic turned him from her entirely. He’d always wanted his grandfather to look at him like he was someone, had always wanted to be magic like he was supposed to, and here was snot-nosed little _Mandy_ with wand in sticky, untrained hand. Tungsten had been holding brittle twigs for years, had perfected his stance, had willed in vain for the water to boil more times than Mandy had ever even considered it. She didn’t deserve it, he felt, and he hated her for it.

Ella, the baby of the family, was just jealous. She’d gotten to be the special one for so long, and yet middle kid Mandy got to steal the spotlight. She didn’t even do anything. She only got a letter.

Mandy turned them all on her heads. Her aunt Miriam had met her husband at a support group for squibs, her mother Charlotte had married muggle Ted Brocklehurst in an attempt to run away from magic, and yet here was a magic kid again to tie them all back together, in one tangled, unforgiving knot. Mandy’s mother loved her, to be certain, but in every interaction they had, Mandy could see the same twinge of regret in Charlotte’s smile, her eyes. A regret of ever having been roped back into things, of ever having Mandy, maybe. 

Ravenclaw that she became, Mandy couldn’t miss the thickening of the air, and she bore it. Every cold stare and snapped word she took onto herself, and she relished in the scant few moments of affection her grandfather offered her. Hogwarts became a home more than that big, muggle place had become, that drafty castle warmer than her own family had been in a long time.

The summer before Mandy’s sixth year, her best friend Megan Jones comes to visit for a week, and it’s meant to be a happy occasion.

Mandy tries so hard to make Megan feel welcome. She’d been so excited to see her, to have this little piece of Hogwarts back during the summer. She’d hoped, in a flimsy way, that maybe her family would see her and Megan together and want to embrace their magic, too.

What a stupid hope.

Her mother had been brusque, waving Mandy away to show Megan around. Her aunt and uncle had veritably disappeared, her siblings either avoided them or sneered, and her grandfather’s only response to being introduced to Megan had been: “A Hufflepuff? Come on, Amanda, you can do better than that.” Albert Caswain had been a Slytherin, in his time.

It takes four days for Mandy to break down. In the medium bedroom on the second floor, Mandy lies on the carpet with Megan at midnight, listening to the soft croon of a record player as The Smiths spin and spin. 

_Because it’s not my home, it’s their home, and I’m welcome no more,_ Morrissey sings, muggle and striking.

Mandy wants to break the record.

“Megan?” she says aloud, cutting through the muffled sort of atmosphere the music had curated. She hears her friend turn to her, but Mandy keeps her gaze trained firmly on the ceiling, tracing patterns in the popcorn. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” Megan asks.

“All this. I thought it would be more fun, having you here,” Mandy says, and is surprised when it comes out a harsh whisper, her throat closing, tears welling at her eyes. “I should’ve known. This house is a nightmare,” she whispers.

“Oh, Mandy, I’m having fun,” Megan hurries to assure her, turning onto her side to lean half-over Mandy, looking her in the eyes. “I like being around you.” This makes her mad, somehow. Mandy’s brow turns down as she sits up, forcing Megan to lean back, and Mandy turns to her with a frustrated lump in her throat.

“But you don’t like being here, right?” she says. Megan opens her mouth, but Mandy doesn’t wait for her to respond. “I know you don’t! _I_ don’t like being here!” It all wells up suddenly, and before this moment, she doesn’t think she’d truly processed it: how awful it is, to live in a house where no one wants you, and the one person who sees you is always demanding more. The sum misery of her brother’s scorn and her mother’s disdain and her aunt and uncle’s distance rises like the tide inside her, and it’s all Mandy can do not to vomit with the force of it, the vileness that floods her.

_Why do I smile at people I’d much rather kick in the eye?_ Morrissey wonders, the song having changed without her noticing, and Mandy wonders too, though not for long.

The one birthday gift her uncle had ever given her that wasn’t something stupid and girly was a penknife when she turned ten. It had a light wooden handle and a sharp blade, and Mandy’s mother had taken it immediately and told her never to use it. When she was thirteen, she stole it back from the sock drawer it had been hidden away in, and she’d kept it ever since. Never used it, hardly ever opened it, but she kept it.

“Mandy,” Megan says, and she says her name gently. When Mandy meets her eyes, there’s a vague understanding to her gaze, and no surprise. Megan had been expecting this, maybe. The thought brings a mild panic, that Megan had been able to see everything so clearly, and yet to even Mandy it was still distant, still something her fingers would slip right through.

“Don’t you want to go home?” Mandy asks, frantically now. The room seems to spin as she turns to her friend, carpet digging into her knees, sure to leave unflattering imprints on her skin. Her cheeks grow wet, and she doesn’t bother to swipe at them. “Don’t you want to leave me, after this?”

Megan’s face twists, and she reaches out, but Mandy jerks back, propelling herself up onto her feet. She curls forward, arms around her stomach, nails biting at the skin of her biceps, everything she’s ever felt welling in her throat. Megan follows her upward, her knees bent so she seems smaller than Mandy, her arms reaching upwards as if to grab her. Megan still looks concerned, but alarm now mingles there, too.

“Mandy, calm down,” Megan murmurs, hesitant hands reaching for her, and Mandy almost laughs.

“I _can’t_ ,” she forces out, breathing heavy, eyes darting around the room. “I hate it here, Megan, I _hate_ it—” She staggers past Megan, heading for her closet, where on a shelf collecting dust rests her penknife, small, heavy, waiting.

“Mandy,” Megan says again, a broken record. “Mandy!”

But she doesn’t stop. She throws open her closet door, its old hinges squealing too loud for the late hour, but not loud enough for Mandy to care. She swipes her arm across the tallest shelf, the one she can’t see over, and grips tightly to the knife when she finds it, like it’s the only thing she’ll ever again hold. She drags it from the shelf, sinks to the carpet right there in front of the door to her closet, and pulls the blade open.

The _click_ it makes is almost drowned out by the slap of Megan’s palm against her wrist as she wrestles the knife away, and Mandy almost growls at her, the noise that comes out of her so wet and inhuman.

“Give it back!” Mandy all but shrieks through her tears, diving toward her friend, and Megan holds her back with one arm pushed against her chest. “Goddammit Megan, give it back!”

“What the hell are you going to do with it?” Megan shouts back, her eyes blown wide, her voice wavering. She’s afraid now, and in her haze, Mandy interprets Megan to be afraid _of_ her instead of _for_ her.

Megan does a well enough job of playing keep-away for a while, but she’s a small girl, and Mandy isn’t. She tears the open knife from her friend’s grip, pulls it back toward her, and in the scant few seconds where she isn’t quite sure what she meant to do with it, Megan pulls out her wand.

Mandy is driving the penknife toward her wrist when Megan says, “ _Imperio_ ,” her voice cracking, yet full of gut-wrenching conviction.

Mandy stops. Her body is trembling, and the knife shudders slightly where it is held in her right hand, point ready to pierce her left wrist. Megan is shaking too, the energy of their confrontation buzzing between them. She begins to cry, and Mandy notices it only vaguely, beyond the sweet haze of the Imperius.

At Megan’s directing, Mandy puts down the knife. Still with her wand pointed, Megan snatches the knife back, clicking the blade back into the handle and pocketing it. For good measure, she has Mandy hand over her wand as well. Megan has her take one deep breath, then two, and before she knows it the dark pit of emotion that had been swirling behind the spell’s fake bliss eases. Far away, it seems, Morrissey sings:

_Last night I felt_  
_Real arms around me_  
_No hope, no harm—_

And the record skips.

_No hope, no harm,_ Morrissey is singing over and over as Megan lowers her wand, and the spell releases. _No hope, no harm._

They make eye contact, and Megan’s eyes are filled with such grief. And Mandy feels such grief.

“I’m sorry,” Megan says, choked, and then she’s saying it again and again, Morrissey’s voice overlaid with hers until it’s a quiet cacophony. “I’m sorry, Mandy, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—" And whether it’s the Unforgivable she’s apologizing for, or everything else, Mandy falls into her arms either way.

Megan holds her, and Mandy Brocklehurst sobs.

**crucio.**

Azkaban is not the only wizarding prison, but it’s by far the worst, and somehow in more recent years it’s been overrun with Voldemort’s followers. Where once Azkaban had housed the most dangerous, potent criminals and the most vile of offenders, now it’s become a glorified tomb for Wizarding Britain’s greatest regret.

It used to be that child molesters and rapists and abusers were considered the same kind of evil as the mass-murderers, received the Kiss or years upon years wasting away in Azkaban, the dementors eating away at them until they were but husks of people. Those who held the capacity to lift a hand against another person, especially a child, in such away were among the most disgusting, the most abhorred wizards imaginable.

When Voldemort’s war sent Wizarding Britain into ruin, Azkaban became something more symbolic than simply a place to stow away the most repulsive of society. As Death Eaters were apprehended and locked away, it became a sign of triumph. Citizens judged the Light’s position in the war based upon how many of Voldemort’s followers were taken out of commission, and so the Ministry scrambled to make Azkaban just the place for it: a trophy case, each new Death Eater another award.

The “less dangerous” criminals were relegated to other prisons. The Warded Penitentiary in Wales, Fengsel Hall in Norway, Yamikeimusho in Japan—all less notorious than Azkaban, none with dementors guarding its prisoners. Child molesters and rapists and abusers joined those criminals in for manslaughter, theft, arson, potion ingredient trading, none on the same level as their evil.

Riley Hipworth was caught selling love potions to naïve—or decidedly less so—witches in Knockturn, and was shunted off to one of London’s smaller prisons for a six-year sentence, some grungy place called Tyrthe Row. His sentence had begun early in Voldemort’s rise, and by three years in now, he’s seen plenty of criminals come and go, some deserving, some more or less so. He’s also seen plenty of people die here, either at their own hands or someone else’s.

It’s always the child molesters who go first.

Riley doesn’t care to remember their names. It’s pointless to, when they all turn out the same. The new guy arrives. He gets situated before the rumor goes around, and sometimes it’s the guy himself who spreads it, sometimes the other prisoners who catch wind of what got him stuck here. His name and cell number gets passed around hand in hand with his crime, and many would think that all criminals see each other the same. Many would be surprised at the venom with which _child rapist_ travels from ear to ear, mouth to mouth.

When you’re arrested, they snap your wand, and if you’re on record as being capable of wandless magic, they cap your magical core, too. It’s why wizards who fistfight are considered like criminals; only those kinds of people will ever need to resort to such tactics. Someone always manages to smuggle in a wand, though, whether stuck up their own ass or tucked into a package from someone on the outside. It’s more about power than escape, having a wand. The prison walls are too heavily warded, but the rooms inside are fair game.

The latest is this weedy, skinny dude who could stand to bathe a tad more often and probably pisses brown. He thinks he’s tough shit, and assumes straight from bat that everyone else will sympathize with him. He’s one of the kind that spreads the knowledge willingly, not knowing he’s stepping toward his own doom. He’s exactly the kind of guy Riley would like to strangle, and the only reason he doesn’t is that he’s trying to keep a low profile. It’s not like he’ll last long anyway. 

True to form, it’s only four days later that his crime catches up with him, and Riley has a front-row view. The majority of the convicts are gathered in one of the common areas, the molester reclining casually on a chair in the middle of them, and they all turns their heads in interest as one of the men—nicknamed Guard Dog, for how many of these guys he’s ripped through—steps up.

The molester looks up at him with the disdainful confidence of a guy who’s never been in a real fight. Guard Dog scowls down at him with the conviction of a man who’s seen plenty.

“You need something, big guy?” the molester says, a sleazy smile on his lips, though Riley can see hints of anxiety there. Guard Dog glowers further, if it’s possible.

“Heard sum floatin’ around about you,” he says, his voice so gravelly it’s nearly a growl. The molester does an admirable job of restraining his flinch. “People are sayin’ you’re into kids.” This, despite the clear intimidation Guard Dog is projecting, earns him a slimy grin.

“’Course, brother. They’re real _sweet_ ,” the molester says, and the air in the room chills.

In sick fascination, Riley watches as Guard Dog pulls his sixth smuggled wand—at least, that’s Riley’s count; Guard Dog’s been here longer than he has—from the waistband of his lank prison pants. He watches as the guy’s face pales, and his grin is wiped away, as the crowd leans in, the energy of the room intensified. It’s a sick pleasure that draws their eyes all there, to the center, as Guard Dog points his wand and says “ _Crucio_.”

A minor disagreement between convicts might result in one guy being held down as another kicks the shit out of him. Sometimes the molesters get that treatment, if no one has a wand on them. Most often, though, it goes like this. No one needs to hold the child rapist down; the Cruciatus does it just fine.

He writhes with the pain of it. His screams are high and shrieking, and Riley’s fellows begin to whoop, shouting encouragement, bidding Guard Dog make him hurt more, hurt worse. As Riley sits there watching, the room grows hot with vindication. Men and women alike shout “ _Get him!_ ,” shout “ _It’s what you deserve, freak!_ ” and Riley agrees. It’s with satisfaction that he sits and watches, chin propped on his hand, devilish smile making his lips curl.

“ _Stop_ ,” the molester is moaning, keening. He’s sweating. He’s fallen out of his chair and now clutches and scrabbles at the cement floor, and still Guard Dog does not release it. He’s the only one without a cruel smile on his face, though his eyes glimmer with the same dark glee.

The guards don’t come. They know this routine as well as the prisoners do. Guard Dog will get this wand confiscated eventually, of course, but not for a while. Not until the guy contorted into painful shapes before them goes mad, or dies.

A tinny bell sounds, signaling lunch time. The atmosphere breaks, Guard Dog ends his spell, and the crowd disperses, heading for the door toward the lunch area. The molester gasps for breath, sobbing.

Riley stands and heads for the door, leaving Guard Dog and his victim behind.

__

__**avada kedavra.** _ _

Anna Marie MacFarlan had seen her husband Hamish through years of his career, first as a player for the Montrose Magpies, then their Captain, then as head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports. She had loved him as a Chaser, brash and bright-eyed, and she’d married him as a Captain, strict but fair.

She had loved him, yes. Wholly and stupidly.

Anna Marie Erhardt had met Hamish MacFarlan in a pub the night before a big Quidditch match. He and his teammates were getting sloshed as a way to deal with the nerves, or so she assumed. He’d seen her sitting at the bar and, not quite drunk yet, decided to try for her.

He was charming, which was the first red flag. A good man is rarely charming in the way Hamish was: effortless, suave, like he’d done it countless times before. A good man will stumble over a few words at least, and Hamish, Anna Marie would learn, was not a good man.

He was nice enough to catch her attention, though, and when he asked for her name, she gave it. “Anna Marie,” she’d said, and he’d repeated it like it was sweet on the tongue.

“Anna Marie. Would sound nice with MacFarlan after it, wouldn’t it?” He’d smiled, pleased with himself. He was so cheeky.

“It’s a nice name, I suppose. Shame I don’t know a MacFarlan,” Anna Marie had drawled back, smirking to herself as Hamish’s face fell some, looking like a kicked puppy before he got his groove back.

“Hamish MacFarlan of the Montrose Magpies,” he’d said, introducing himself with a flick of his hair and a quirk of his brow. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“And I yours,” Anna Marie had responded. He’d had just the right amount of self-importance to draw her in. Quidditch player, handsome face, smooth tongue—he’d seemed like such a catch, and what a wonder to have caught him on a quiet night at the bar alone.

They began to exchange owls after that, and Anna Marie would just about wait at the window for his beautiful eagle owl to arrive every Friday, eager to smooth its feathers and untie the letter it had brought. They talked that way for months. He hadn’t been able to invite her to the game she’d caught him before, but he invited her to the next, and the next, and soon they went out for tea every week. She, muggleborn, would show him movies, and he, a halfblood, would take her on tours of the little wizarding villages that pocketed the country. It was a happy few months, that time when they weren’t quite dating, when he’d tried to woo her and she’d let him.

When they did start dating in earnest, Hamish had bought them a little cottage to move into together. He was thirty, she twenty-nine, and he was reaching the tail end of his career as a player. He became Captain two years before he’d retired, and remained Captain for four more years from the sidelines, so trusted of a player was he. She married him that third year, when he’d asked her in front of a crowd of Quidditch fans, the roar of excitement deafening her.

Looking back, that proposal was rather underhanded of him. Very Slytherin, coming from a Gryffindor alumn.

When they first moved in together, life was a dream. Anna Marie had been adrift for quite a while, unsure of herself, with no real idea where she wanted to go, or how to meet anyone new. Her friends had drifted away in the years after graduation, and while she was always on good terms with the people she worked with, she’d never quite managed to forge as close of friendships as she’d had when she’d walked Hogwarts’ halls. Hamish had been only a year older than her, then, but the years had all been much bigger, too, and she’d only ever really had eyes for her own House, let alone anyone from another age group. If they’d ever met, it wasn’t more than bumping shoulders in the hall—and so she’d never heard his old horror stories. She hadn’t been there to listen to the girls whisper to stay away.

Two months into their relationship, Anna Marie realized Hamish was pushy. If he asked her to do something and she said no, he’d whine at her until she got up and did it, and if she was busy on a night he wanted to take her out, he pouted at her until she cancelled her plans. He was good at guilting her into things, and she was content to let him, until there came everything else.

Hamish got angry easily, too, and it was sweet when he got mad on her behalf—at the creeps who’d leer at her, or the women who tried to cut her in line at the supermarket, or the teenagers who spelled their front hedges into crude shapes. It was less sweet when he began to shout at her for breaking a plate, when he slammed doors and broke locks, and the first time he’d laid a hand on her, she swore to herself she’d break it off.

She’d been trying to wait for him to cool off before she broke it to him that she wanted to end their relationship. And then he’d sprung the ring on her, in front of a crowd of rabid fans who all knew his name, knew his career, and what choice did she have, in the face of it?

Of course she’d said yes.

When they got married, she still loved him. Her heart’s folly, that she could love a man who raised a hand against her. She’d cursed herself when she saw him in his suit at the end of the aisle, cursed his gentle hands in bed that night, cursed the world that saw fit to have abuse and kindness coexist. Hamish was not a good man, but he did love her, and perhaps that was worse.

She is forty-three and it is raining the night that Hamish pushes her into bed and rapes her. He had wanted it, and she’d told him no, and even after years of hands gripped too tight around her wrist and broken furniture and loud words, she’d believed at least that he wouldn’t do this to her. That he loved her enough not to.

He didn’t.

When he’s finished, she’s flushed both with rage and from crying. The rain, pattering against their skylight, has drowned out the sound of her sobs, and as he pulls away from her, she lay trembling, her trousers and underwear pulled down halfway, her neck near-purple where he’d held her down. She gulps in ragged, wet breaths as he staggers toward their bathroom, and as she listens to him piss loudly into the toilet, what fills her is not the blank dissociation she’d given way to during the act. Instead, anger takes the reins.

How dare he. Six years of love and eight years of tolerance, of “Yes, dear,” and “Of course, honey,” and fourteen years of believing this, at least, was a line he wouldn’t cross, and he crossed it. How dare he take what she had given up and then demand more. How dare he desecrate her in this way.

Anna Marie pushes herself to her feet, gropes blindly at their nightstand for her wand as she keeps her gaze trained on his reflection in the bathroom mirror. She cannot see his body from this angle, but it doesn’t matter. She’s not trying to be stealthy. She’s not, for the moment, trying anything, other than to hold her wand as tight as possible in her hand. Her tool. Her weapon.

Hamish comes out from the bathroom, tucking his dick back into his pants as he walks back into the room. He sees her standing and stops, looking at her with dark eyes, and in them is none of the man she’d loved.

“What, sweet-cheeks? Need somethin’?” he asks, and more than anything, this is what sets her off.

“ _Need something_?” she shouts, all her fury exploding outward. “What the fuck, Hamish? _Need something_?” She laughs, a ragged and humorless thing, for the force of her anger.

His gaze darkens. He starts toward her, and despite herself, she steps back.

“What’s with that attitude, Mary-Mac?” he asks coldly, the nickname spoken like an insult. He’d started calling her that after they’d been married, and she’d taken his name. ‘Mary’ for Marie, ‘Mac’ for MacFarlan. She’d liked it, at first. She’d thought that maybe things would be different, that this pet name would be the beginning of it.

“I don’t much like your tone,” Hamish says. She lifts her chin, steeling herself against another bout of tears that threatens to well up. He lashes out, grasping her right wrist, and squeezes—probably in effort to make her drop her wand. She doesn’t.

“Fuck you,” Anna Marie says, and spits in her husband’s face.

He releases her wrist to backhand her forcefully, and she stumbles back again, her bare butt knocking painfully against the edge of the nightstand. She ignores it. She raises her wand.

Hamish, the asshole, laughs. “The hell do you think you’re gonna do with that thing, sweetheart?” he says, derision dripping from his voice, and these are the words that make her sure. Certainty has never been so true and deep in her blood, conviction never so harshly writ in her bone.

“ _Avada Kedavra_ ,” Anna Marie Erhardt says, because she wants Hamish MacFarlan dead.

When he falls, so does she, collapsing to her knees, her pants still pulled down around them, the second wave of sobs that she’d been holding back coming out. She cries, and with her tears comes everything she’d bottled up since she met him, full to bursting.

The rain batters the skylight, the bathroom light her only illumination, and a dead man lies on her carpet. And she cries.

__

__**“unforgivable.”** _ _

But Mandy Brocklehurst forgave Megan Jones, and thanked her, when she calmed down and realized what she’d almost done.

But a mother grinned in vicious vindication when she’d heard her child’s abuser had died in prison.

But Anna Marie Erhardt’s mother had forgiven her, when she’d gone back to her childhood home and begged for that forgiveness, crying over and over again that _she’d just wanted to get away. She’d just wanted it to be over._

But many things. But the Unforgivables were never spells only in the hands of Dark Lords and their followers. But that the point of view of a child, a Chosen One, would of course see them as unforgivable—he had never had the opportunity to learn all the ways such spells are used, what they’re used for.

There has always been more than one way to _mean it_.

**Author's Note:**

> Mandy Brocklehurst, Megan Jones, and Hamish MacFarlan are all canonical characters within the Harry Potter universe. There is a potioneer named Glover Hipworth who I gave a son in the form of Riley Hipworth, and for the purpose of the last section, I invented Anna Marie Erhardt. Mandy Brocklehurst's family is of my own making, as is the fact that most of them are squibs. Any of the characters you meet in this fic, you're free to use with credit, if you so desire.
> 
> All musical lyrics in the Imperio section are property of The Smiths.
> 
> so.. with that out of the way, i hope you enjoyed this fic, if you've read this far! it's not a happy one, but it's a concept i very much wanted to explore. i was thinking about those stories of girls who kill their sex trafficker, and how we generally don't morally blame them for the act. mundane murder can be excused in such cases, so i wanted to point out that the unforgivables might be used in much the same light.
> 
> leave a comment if you liked this! they mean a lot to me.


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